Every year there seems to be a film version of a television show
that was popular at some point. Last we had “The Dukes of
Hazzard” which features Jessica Simpson in her big screen
debut. The film was a moderate success due to its hardcore fans
who wanted to see The General Lee one more time. This year, we
have “Miami Vice” in which the TV version starred Don
Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. The show created lots of fashion,
from the fashion to the music and to brutality of the plot in each
episode. Unlike the previous TV to film releases, this film is
being directed by the same guy who started the show, Michael Mann.
Mann had since gone on to do feature films such as “Heat”, “The
Inside Man”, and “Collateral”. Playing Sonny
Crockett and Rico are Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. Naomie Harris
plays Detective Trudi and Gong Li plays a drug dealer liaison.
At a recent press conference in LA, the cast spoke about working
together on this version of the hit TV show.

Michael, the music was such an integral part of the television show. How
important was it for you to maintain that level of authenticity, in terms of
the music, with this film?

Michael Mann: Music is always key to me, whether it’s ‘Miami
Vice’ or not ‘Miami Vice.’ It’s dictated
by the story, about what Crockett and Tubbs and Isabella and Trudy
are doing. And, since the movie tries to get into the lives
of these folks as intensely as possible, I wanted music that, hopefully,
had the power to do that, consequently, the Mogwai and some of
the Audioslave. So, that’s what informed most of those
choices.

Michael, you had huge success with this series 20 years ago. Did you worry
about going back to do it as a movie? And, for Colin and Jamie, to take
on these iconic roles, what was the appeal?

Mann: First of all, it’s all Jamie’s fault because
he talked me into this, starting in 2002, at Ali’s birthday party.

Jamie Foxx: Yeah, I did.

Mann: But, when the proposition became really exciting for myself,
and then for all of us, was the idea of really getting into undercover work,
and what it does to you, what you do to it, and the whole idea of living
a fabricated identity that’s actually just an extension of yourself,
and doing it in 2006 -- doing it for real and doing it right now. If
you think about it, that then defines a whole bunch of stuff. You’re
not going to have crocodiles or alligators, and you’re not going to
have sailboats. You’re not going to have nostalgia. And,
you’re going to do it for real, as a big picture that’s going
to be R-rated because you do dangerous work in difficult places where bad
things happen, you have relations with women, there’s sexuality and
there’s language, and that became an exciting proposition. But,
it started with the real function, for the actors, and myself as well, as
what is undercover work, for real? What is that stuff? And then,
all these folks went and did a lot of that work themselves.

Foxx: I was in it because it’s hot. The hotness
of this idea. When I talked to Michael Mann, and just learned about
who Michael Mann was, I made a couple rookie mistakes, saying, “Why
don’t you do ‘Miami Vice’? You did it as a television
show. And, we do Jay-Z, and we do this and we do that.” And,
he was like, “Get out of here!” But, after enough of me
going up to him and saying, “Look, I really think that this is a great
opportunity for you to take a commercial hit, a franchise, and bring the
real film capability that Michael Mann has together.” So, now,
we’re all protected, in the sense of, we’re doing a big-time
summer movie, but it’s still held together by the Michael Mann way
of thinking. So, that’s why I wanted to do it.

Colin Farrell: Here, here. No. As the two boys have
said, it was Jamie’s idea. I had been talking to Michael for
a couple of years about finding something to do together, and then this came
along and it was just the perfect opportunity. I knew that Michael,
from the onset, wanted to get . . . We all know he can handle an action sequence,
whether it’s the piece that he did with ‘The Last of the Mohicans,’ or
whether it’s that very famous scene in ‘Heat,’ he can understand
the choreography of an action sequence, and a very highly volatile one. But,
unless it’s backed up with some human drama, and unless you have some
kind of emotional investment in the characters . . . He understands that
the validity of doing big-scale things isn’t there, unless you really
do care about the characters that you’re watching. So, with that
in mind, I didn’t really think much about good old Don Johnson. If
I was to think about the early Crockett, I would have been in fuckin’ trouble
because I would have been arguing with him over the suits that I wanted to
wear, and no socks with my slip-ons, and all that kind of stuff. And,
where’s my crocodile? Jamie said that he met Don in a restaurant
in Los Angeles, and what did he say?

Farrell: I’m still waiting, but it never arrived -- the
jock strap. It might have added something interesting to the character. “Why
is he always itching his balls?” “He’s wearing Don
Johnson’s jock strap.” But, no. ‘Miami Vice,’ the
TV show, was the original genesis for this piece, but we approached it from,
as Michael said, a very contemporary standpoint, and it’s its own entity,
really.

For Jamie and Colin, can you talk a little bit about the love scenes? Jamie,
Naomie told some stories about you at ‘Pirates 2' interviews, about the
love scenes?

Foxx: Let’s hear from Naomie.

Naomie Harris: I was really nervous about doing the love scenes
because I haven’t done one before, actually, and simulating sex in
front of 50 people is always really intimidating. But, Michael was
really great because he made sure that there were as few people as possible
in the room, and Jamie was fantastic as well because he really tried to make
me feel comfortable, and keep me laughing, as well, as much as possible. He
presented me with a rather unusual present, while we were in the shower,
about to do our nude scene together.

Farrell: Like 9 inches.

[Laughs]

Harris: Wrapped in a sock with a bow.

Foxx: I thought the most important thing to do with this love
scene is, nobody makes love . . . After you’ve been with someone for
a period of years, its never like music and flowers and candles. No,
it’s not like that. There’s a little bit of fun. You
kind of know each other. So, that was the reasoning of having that
comic relief. We’ve done it before, so that makes it easier,
as opposed to slow motion.

Was that your idea, Michael?

Mann: As he was saying, it comes out of the nature of the relationship. Tubbs
is the more volatile of the two partners, but his life is centered in this
relationship. And, as Jamie was saying, it’s Tuesday night. It’s
not the profound experience that Crockett has, when he meets the right woman
and the wrong woman, and they get together. That’s what was appealing
to me about the whole structure of it -- these two very different kinds of
events.

Colin, what about the sex scenes with you and Gong Li?

Farrell: Yeah. As we were saying, Isabella and Crockett
are two people who find each other, in the wrong place, at the wrong time,
though they’re the right people. That’s the unfortunate
thing about what transpires between the two of them. To quote good
old Jerry Maguire, they do kind of complete each other. They are two
people that live in very volatile environments. He’s on one side
of the law and this woman, Isabella, is on the other side of the law, and
they come together in what is a very dangerous idea and a very bad idea. The
scene they have in Havana, they say at the bar, “You know, this is
never going to last. It’s never going to work,” but they
find in each other, in that act of making love, that it’s almost overwhelming. It’s
almost too much to take. Crockett’s someone that would have had
one night stands, over the years, prolifically, and never be emotionally
attached to anyone, and one of the primary reasons would be the work that
he involves himself in. But, he finds, with this woman, someone that
seems to make complete sense, perfect sense. And so, doing our scene
together was just about emotional investment, or emotional realization, in
seeing some of yourself -- maybe the best of yourself, and none of the worst
-- in the other person, but there is something quite tragic too it, as well,
I suppose.

Colin and Jamie, how will this ‘Miami Vice’ make people forget
the old ‘Miami Vice’? And, how challenging was it for you
to also step into the shoes of those particular actors? Was it hard for
you to maintain a completely different degree of freshness to the roles?

Foxx: Not everybody is thinking about the television series
because I don’t think that people are actually remembering every single
episode. That’s why it’s a different thing. This
is just a hot concept, hot movie, and I don’t think they’re going
to be comparing the two. I always view things like this, and you tell
me if this plays true to you. I view things like, “What do I
want to see when I’m in the movie theater?” I’m not
quite as dense as Michael Mann is, in that sense. I’ve got my
popcorn, I’m sitting there, and I’m thinking, “What would
be hot to see right now? A car, two guys in Miami, Jay-Z on the soundtrack,
and something is going down.” Not everybody is relating back
to what they saw. They know what happened with ‘Miami Vice,’ years
ago, but they’re ready to go see what the new thing is. A lot
of kids who are like 17, 18, 19, 21, that are watching this trailer, are
into the hipness of Colin Farrell, of maybe Jamie Foxx, and they’re
going, “That looks hot. I want to see that.” I put
my hoodie on and sneak into the theater, or take a girl to the theater and
act like I don’t know the trailer’s about to run, [laughs] and
I go, “Oh, they’re running this? Oh, this is crazy!” And
then, I head people say, “Oh, man, I’ve got to go see that,” and
then I pull the hoodie off and let people see that I’m in the theater,
and then I bounce. I do that a lot. And, that’s how it
is. For the sake of it, it’s commercial. It’s really
that commercial thing that you attach yourself to and you go with that, but
like I said, this is where you’re grounded, in that situation. So,
I don’t think that there’s going to be that comparison.

Mann: We never conceived of it as a derivative. It’s
2006, it’s ‘Miami Vice’ for real, right now, and, at it’s
core, it has an emotional, overt way of telling its story, and it takes place
in the alluring, perfumed reality of Miami, in which you’ve got this
layer of things that are very sensuous and beautiful, and underneath it,
there’s stuff that’s very, very dangerous. So, in that
sense, it has an independent origin. I don’t think people will
be sitting there and comparing the two. The two are co-equal. The
series occupies its place in cultural history, for better and for worse,
and this is 2006. It’s a new day.

Why call it ‘Miami Vice’ then?

Foxx: Why call it ‘Miami Vice’? I don’t
understand that question. You saw ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ but
it wasn’t anything like [the original]. Do you understand what
I’m saying? You’re not taking ‘Miami Vice,’ the
series. You’re taking the spirit of that and you’re doing
the movie.

Mann: That’s exactly right. It’s the spirit of it. It’s
the core of it. It’s who these people are. So, at the core
of Crockett is Crockett, at the core of Tubbs is Tubbs, but they’re re-imagined
in 2006, in a different world, in a different place, in a different Miami.

Why didn’t you use the theme song to put it all together?

Foxx: I’ll put it to you this way -- I understand exactly
what you’re saying. I believe this movie is high risk, high return
because you do go away from what you think it is. But, you can’t
keep re-hashing it. It’s like watching the dunk contest today. You
can’t go in and do the Dr. J dunk anymore because you’re kind
of past that, so if you come from the free-throw line, you’ve seen
it. But, if you’re wearing Dr. J’s jersey, and you bounce
it off the backboard from the back, and then you dunk it, you’ve got
the spirit of Dr. J and you changed it. Did that do it for you?
[Laughs]

For all of you, what was the most difficult part about shooting this film,
and was there any kind of training for the weapons you used?

Mann: Everybody went through training, and went through a lot
of it. A lot of hard work went into it, and they look good because
they are good, and they are good because they really can do everything that
we see in the film, including all of the physical stuff. The most difficult
thing to acquire is all the skills that I think these folks have, in terms
of really being in an undercover situation. When they’re confronted
at Jose Yero’s, and these guys have responses, and they accuse Yero
of being the man hooked up with the DEA, or the street theater that they
put down on Isabella in the house, when they pretend that they’re bringing
back the dope which we know they stole, and the skill and the self-confidence
they have came from lots of scenarios that Colin and Jamie and Naomie and
Gong Li did, with real folks who really do do this stuff. They did
simulations that were very, very realistic, and they did it a lot. I’m
real proud of their work, and the benefit of it is what you see on screen.

Just talking about being in 2006, obviously drug trafficking is a very serious
thing, and you treated it that way. Even though this is a serious topic,
the tongue-in-cheek from the old series wasn’t in this. Was that on
purpose?

Mann: It’s a different subject. If I took you through
the first two years’ episodes, which I consider to be the real core
of ‘Miami Vice,’ these are exactly the kind of stories that were
being told. They were poignant, they were emotional, they weren’t
happy endings. So, there were these kind of stories. And then,
there was some lighter stuff that would enter in, once in awhile.

Farrell: As I remember it, and a lot of people I know remember
it, ‘Miami Vice’ only became camp in hindsight. At the
time, it was a really cutting edge show. The subject matter was really
dark -- drugs, prostitution, so on and so forth -- with Crockett’s
backstory, with his two children and his wife. Some very reality-based
situations were dealt with very honestly, for the time, and as you said,
this has just been elevated to today’s modern age. I saw a twinkle
in Jamie’s eye when I was watching it.

Michael, how has your personal view on how you see these characters changed
in the 20 years since you did the series?

Mann: Somebody reminded me of a line in the pilot. Tony
Yerkovich wrote the pilot, and created ‘Miami Vice,’ and there
was a line in the pilot where a woman says to Crockett, “Do you sometimes
forget who you are?” And, he says, “Darlin’, sometimes
I remember who I am.” And, that is the core of that character,
and the volatility of Tubbs and the way he would rise to anger. One
episode, he gets furious because somebody shoots at him with a machine gun ‘cause
machine guns scare him, and when he gets scared, he gets really angry. That
spirit is the same in these characters. These characters, in that sense,
in their hearts and their souls and what they reach down into when they really
have to rise to the occasion, are identical. So, the center of these
people is the same.

Michael, there was no smoking in this film. Was that a deliberate choice? And,
Colin, how did you manage to get through the takes without smoking?

Farrell: Oh, it was tough.

Mann: It was not a deliberate choice. John Hawkes, in one of the opening
scenes, actually is smoking a cigarette when he’s pulled over in that
Bentley.

Farrell: We were originally going to go with a costume that was made of Nicorette
patches for me, but it kept melting in the Miami sun. [Laughs] It was okay.

What are your thoughts about all the smoking in movies? There was a report
that came out this week about how there are more teens smoking because of what
they see in movies and on television. Do you have any thoughts about
smoking, in general?

Mann: I don’t, really. But, when I’m making
a movie, the integrity has to be about making that drama, and if somebody
was to be a smoker because that’s what his character would do, he would
smoke.

For Michael, the two Columbian guys are played by a Puerto Rican guy and a
Spanish guy. What was the casting process for the Latino characters,
and wasn’t Gong Li’s role originally done for a Latina?

Mann: No. It was a Cuban woman, and that was it. I’ve
wanted to work with Gong Li for a long time, and there is a very vibrant
Chinese Cuban community in Havana, which we visited and spent substantial
time with. And, I know Luis Tosar from a film he did with Javier Bardem
that hasn’t been released here. And, John Ortiz knocked me out
in ‘Narc,’ so he just had to be Jose Yero.

Michael, I understand that, when you shoot these action sequences, you have
a lot of cameras going. How much of this was story boarded, and how much
do you do once you’re there?

Mann: I don’t story board. I do something else,
which is I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words,
when everybody’s training, they’re actually training a lot of
the moves that we are definitely going to use, and then, I do a lot of photography
of that, and that becomes where the cameras go.

Jamie, you obviously play a very good, cool guy in this movie,
and you seem to be a cool, likeable guy in real life. The article that
Kim Masters wrote kind of portrays you as the bad guy, as far as the making
of this film was concerned. Would you like to comment about what was
said?

Mann: That’s just nonsense.

Foxx: See.

[Laughs]

The article was nonsense?

Mann: Yeah. The article is nonsense, and a lot of the
perspective of the article is nonsense.
Foxx: This is one of those films where a lot of stories were just written. They
were just writing stories about stuff.

Farrell: The second week into the shoot, me and Jamie were killing
each other, and I hadn’t even met him yet.

Mann: These guys weren’t getting along, and we were finishing
the movie in Peru. That was one story.

Foxx: But, that makes the opening [bigger]. “Let’s
go see what all the hubbub’s about.” You let all that go. Everybody
descended on Miami. People were coming to Miami just ‘cause we
were shooting down there. I’ve read crazy, crazy stuff that wasn’t
true, but I think it all plays into the hands of making people get up in
there and get them tickets, and see what’s going on.

Isn’t there a basis in fact for these rumors? They just come out
of nowhere?

Farrell: Yeah, we’re in the same film together. That’s
all it really takes, you know. It doesn’t take much.

Mann: We knew we were going into a major hurricane season in
Miami ‘cause we were shooting in the summer. All you have to
do is go on the web and look up the U.S. Weather Bureau, and you find out
the history of hurricanes in Miami keeps getting worse, so we knew it, we
provided for it in production’s deal with the studio -- what would
happen, officially, on this picture if there was a tropical storm watch to
tropical storm warning to hurricane watch to hurricane warning. So,
we all knew this was common and we prepared for it, and we were a lot more
fortunate, in our circumstances, to weather these hurricanes than a lot of
the local folks were, and certainly everybody in New Orleans that got hit
by Katrina. And then, we had this shooting incident, and that went
public. Absolutely, that happened. Our security precautions that
we had prepared worked flawlessly. That’s why a guy who was,
in fact, a policeman was stopped by uniformed Dominican military, which was
our outer-perimeter security. We take safety very, very seriously on
every film I make, and that’s why I’ve never had a serious accident
or anybody killed, when I make a picture. Everybody had to leave in
a very prescribed way. And then, I was not going to shoot in the Dominican
Republic anymore because we didn’t know what the backstory was. You
have to think about these things. Does this guy have five brothers? Do
they have a lot of animosity with the military that you don’t know
about, and now they’re blaming Gong Li, or something? Who knows. So,
you change the stuff you’re doing. That’s the process. The
important thing is not the process. The important thing is the product.

Michael, what was the purpose behind cutting the opening boat scene you had
shot, and will it be on the DVD?

Mann: You always do it. I asked myself, way in the beginning,
how should this story tell itself? And, one of the things that attracted
me to ‘Collateral,’ by the way, was the fact that it was a really
tight construction, and I always felt the [‘Miami Vice’] story
should be tight. You should be dropped into their lives and just taken
away from it. I think audiences are really smart and they’re
really intelligent, and I think that you can place the audience almost like
they’re right on Jamie and Colin’s shoulder, and you don’t
have to explain, “Well, now we’re going to go into this club
and maybe this pimp, Neptune, is going to show up.” You don’t
have to go through all that. You can bring the audience, hopefully,
into a much more immediate experience of what these guys do and how they
do it. You don’t have to be inside a joke, you can be a participant
in a joke. And so, the movie tells its story that way, and I wanted
it to have an intensity and a drive, where BANG, you’re in it. And
then, when that movie ends, it cuts to black, and that’s as much of
this story as we’re telling right now. So, consequently, I have
to make a lot of really difficult, hard, heart-breaking decisions, sometimes,
about material that is really great and that I really love, and people do
fabulous work in. Unfortunately, I have to serve the greater good of
the experience of the picture. So, the stuff will absolutely be on
the DVD.

For Colin and Gong Li, what was the chemistry like and how did you find the
center between the two of you, with the obvious language barrier that you
have?

Colin: I sign.

[Laughs]

Gong Li: There are a lot of things that you don’t have
to use language to communicate. You can use eye contact, body language,
and so on. That’s what art is about.